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All posts for the month April, 2014

At church today the homily was about how Jesus was just like us, except for the sin part because he was perfect.

Basically Jesus is like the kid down the block that could play oboe at 6, never talked back and always got straight As, even when math started being about letters. (Seriously…how is X ever anything but X?) Thanks. No pressure.

But at least the take-away was simple. Jesus = perfect.

No sin. Gotcha.

Then it got confusing. They trotted out the whole life story of Jesus, leading up to the big Easter event. (The rising from the dead miracle part, not the rabbit that somehow lays eggs part.)

The priest was all, “Jesus was born, did some stuff, got baptized, made a mess of a temple…”

And I was all, “Wait, baptized? Ummm, if he was perfect and without sin, why did he need to get baptized?”.

On another note, after much procrastination and self doubt, I’ve decided what to do to increase the action early on in my novel.

I was having trouble deciding how to move all of my plot related action up early enough in the story to satisfy requests to speed up the action at the beginning. So, I started thinking about other books I love and asking myself what the “action” was early in those stories.

What I realized was that most of the early action isn’t specifically big-P plot related, and it doesn’t have to be huge. The early conflicts set up our knowledge that the character is in a precarious position so that when the big plot points hit we are already worried about the character.

I don’t know why that was such a revelation to me. Now that I’ve thought about it, it seems like an obvious point. But then again, I didn’t know Rice Krispies were made of actual rice so…

Writing Exercise:

Conflict is all around us (or at least all around me). Every few days I find myself facing the type of low level stress-events that make my heart race for a few minutes until my logical brain takes over to say “I can deal with that”.

The boss that’s yelling about a project you’re involved in…will he know the mistake wasn’t yours?

The call from the bank telling you that you may have been a victim of skimming…are there any false transactions?

Squealing tires behind you…are you about to be hit?

Each of these stressful events on their own are nothing. A thousand of them building up together could make me snap (last week was a close one). But in a small cluster, these events can tell us something about our environment, and we can use them to tell the readers about our character’s environment, and increase tension. (How could I just be learning this now?)

Think through your last week. How many times did you growl in frustration, startle at a loud noise or feel sick before stepping into a meeting or picking up the phone? Make a list of your little heart racing moments then ask yourself why you reacted the way you did. What do those events and your reactions tell you about your life? Free write and see where your explanations take you.